


The Past and Possibility

by Lucyemers



Category: Endeavour (TV), The Hour
Genre: Bel Rowley is possible, Crossover, Gen, Post Series Finale-The Hour, Post Series season 4- Endeavour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-15
Updated: 2017-09-15
Packaged: 2018-12-30 05:33:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12101835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lucyemers/pseuds/Lucyemers
Summary: "Have you checked on the new girl?"In 1967 The Hour is still going strong. They need a new secretary.  Joan Thursday needs another escape.





	The Past and Possibility

**Author's Note:**

> A while back I was tagged by @jomiddlemarch on Tumblr to do a fandom crossover game. This has been kicking around in my head since.

**Lix**

“Have you checked on the new girl?”, she asks Bel on her way out of her office. Bel pauses, turns back, eyebrow quirked, “Does she need checking on?” 

“She's got a bit of the deer in the headlights look about her.” 

“She's not fresh out of school. She was a bank teller for years.” Bel hangs back, leans in the door frame, takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes, her momentum on her relentless route to the next task having been stalled. . 

“Darling I'm not questioning your judgement. She's doing a perfectly adequate job.”

“I don’t know why you have a sudden worry about our new secretary.”

Lix lights a cigarette, stalling, inhales slowly and remembers on a slow, measured exhale, meeting the new girl’s eyes in a passing glance, an off hand good morning, and seeing them full of fear and sadness, only to have snapped back to a perfect mannered composure, or very nearly, when Lix had extended a hand to introduce herself. Perhaps it is unreasonable for Lix to worry as she’d so clearly caught the girl with her mind elsewhere. But her glance had caused Lix to spend the morning remembering what it’s like to suddenly start a new chapter after the last one had ended so quickly and with such finality. 

“I’m not worrying, merely wondering. I’m a journalist”, she says in a tone she hopes is dismissive. “It’s in your nature too and you know it. Perhaps if we make her feel a bit at home she won’t leave us so soon as the last few.”

“Mmm”, Bel says by way of grudging agreement as she leaves Lix to her thoughts.

**Bel**

Deer in the headlights is not how Bel would have described her, she thinks as she stops by her desk, on her way out of the office for lunch. She’s really rather more put together than that. Hair perfectly coiffed, eye liner expertly applied, nothing surprising about that in a secretary, the same might be said for the last several they’ve had, but she does have a very earnest quality in her eyes, that reminds Bel of Sissy in a way, though the confident set to her shoulders betrays a bit more life lived. 

“Is there anything else I can do for you, Mrs. Lyon?” she asks.

“Bel’s just fine, and not just at the moment Miss…I’m sorry, you’ll have to remind me.”

“Thursday.” She offers her hand and Bel takes it as she continues with, “Call me Joan.”  
“Have you a lunch packed?” Bel asks and Joan’s bright expression dims a bit and she hesitates. Bel doesn’t quite understand the worried crease to her features. It’s not as if she’s asked some prying question.

“No”, she remarks simply.

“Well, there’s a decent enough cafe downstairs and around the corner. Get your things and join me.”

**Joan**

She still isn’t quite used to how quickly everything moves, the people and the city around her. It’s all Joan can do to keep up in her pair of newly mended and polished pumps. They take a seat at a smoky cafe and Bel orders the both of them soup with thankfully no sandwiches, she’s not sure she could have managed that.

She remembers quick lunches with the girls at the bank, easy banter that would inevitably change to gossip. She loved those small escapes in the middle of all that boredom. But of course she hadn’t realized how much she loved them at the time. She thinks with a small pang of guilt that she hasn’t talked to any of the girls from work in nearly a year. 

“You’ve found a good place to rent?” Bel asks.

“It’s alright”, Joan says. The door sticks horribly and it’s barely bigger than the table where they sit. But it’s hers. She adores it. 

“Where are you from?”

“Oxford.” 

“Oh, Lix has a friend there, I think. London must be a change.” Bel says casually, stirring milk into her coffee.

“I like it.” 

And it’s true, she does. She hears the city awake around her long after she’s gone to bed. She thinks about going to join it, stepping out the door of her tiny flat and living the life she hoped to live the last time she made an escape. But she doesn’t quite have the strength for it. Give it time, she thinks to herself. A few more cafe lunches. A few more dinners by herself, whenever she wants them. A few more weeks of having no one to notice what time shes comes home.

They are joined, suddenly by Freddie Lyon, the journalist on the home desk and sometimes presenter of the program, who she has heard is also, oddly enough, the producer’s husband. 

“What’s this, a private party?” he pulls up a chair from a neighboring table and sits very close to Bel. 

“Yes and you’re not invited”, she returns, even as she’s smiling at him. She bats his hand away as he pops a finger in her soup and tastes it. “Always perfecting the tomato here”, he pronounces. 

“Behave”, she says teasingly, clasping the same hand she had reprimanded and resting their laced fingers in her lap. “ or Miss Thursday will be leaving us for a more civilized office”

“Joan”, she gently corrects. 

“Yes, we met this morning”, Freddie says, flagging down the waitress, and pulling his notebook out of his pocket all in a single movement. He nearly never stops moving. She had noticed this about him this morning when she’d delivered a few messages to his desk. He was cross referencing the newspapers, shifting his notes on his desk, clicking away at his pen distractedly. This physical restlessness and his eyes bright with curiosity, together with his thin frame, his slight limp, his disheveled appearance, all of this almost reminds her of…. But then she watches him as he watches Bel, while they discuss the morning, and no, there’s too much happiness, too much jollity in his eyes for the comparison to hold up.

“We do hope you stay with us for a while, Miss Thursday. We’ve had the worst luck with secretaries leaving us recently.” 

“If you can help it, please don’t go getting married, being someone’s Mummy, and leaving us any time soon”, Bel says wearily. 

“That’s a bit pot and kettle isn’t it?” Freddie chides.

“I said, ‘if you can help it’.” Bel says, “And I did not leave”. 

“And you ought to be glad that Sissy found herself a nice young doctor, years ago and left, or else who would pick Maude up from school and give her tea every Thursday night.” 

“Alright Freddie, yes I know.” She rolls her eyes at him and smiles. Then she breaks out of their easy teasing routine as his food is arriving to check back in with Joan saying, “Really, all his sound and fury signifies only that we are glad you are here, and that we hope you’ll stay.”

In the past two months Joan had stopped trying to imagine her future beyond necessary practicalities: get through today, get through tomorrow and then later: join the secretarial agency, take the job, move to London. But in watching them she thinks maybe she could start imagining again. In Bel’s weariness from work, in their easy touches, in the way they seem to forget she’s even there when they start talking about the program she sees it: possibility. 

She smiles, sips her coffee. 

“I will”, she says.

**Author's Note:**

> Since it appears that Joan is in Endeavour Season 5 I highly doubt she'll be able to get out of Oxford and start over with a clean slate, but I really, really want her to.
> 
> Also, I've borrowed Freddie and Bel's daughter's name from one of Oldshrewsburyian's fics.


End file.
